This is the fifth of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that’s how complicated.

Part V: My TiVo Gets Nervous

With my TiVo networking hardware in transit and our TiVo out of guide data, we were desperate. For a few days we lived like plebes, our lives dictated by programming schedules and tortured by commercials. It was unbearable.

Then one day I turned on the TV and TiVo wasn’t unhappy anymore. What? Apparently it finally held a modem connection long enough to update itself. If this worked often enough, I wouldn’t have to do a thing. I think my TiVo got nervous that I’d be ripping it open soon, possibly frying it in the process. But soon the bridge and the network card arrived and I wasn’t backing down now. I tested out the wireless bridge with my laptop and it worked perfectly. I upgraded the firmware just to be diligent and it was a go there.

Since I had already upgraded my TiVo drive twice, opening it up again wasn’t a big deal. I had the special torx driver set to open it up, so it came apart quickly. Getting the TurboNet card in wasn’t hard, so I quickly had it installed and without putting the case back on I plugged it in and hooked it up. I powered on the TiVo. The good news was that it booted up normally and didn’t blow up. The bad news was that there was no link light on the TurboNet card, which means it couldn’t talk to the network. I tried dialing out from the TiVo anyway and it didn’t work.

Gah!! When will this end?? Or rather, when will I stop insisting that I be on the bleeding edge of technology while also remaining relatively frugal?

It was reported that you didn’t need to install any drivers or anything to make the TurboNet work; newer versions of the TiVo software had it built-in. Assuming that this was the problem for a minute, I booted up my old “answering machine” with a Linux Boot CD and installed the drivers onto the TiVo’s hard drive. While I was in there I enabled telnet and FTP on the box so I could get into it later without installing the drive into my PC. I reinstalled the hard drive in the TiVo and started it up. Once again it didn’t instantly become a flaming box of metal and plastic, but the TurboNet didn’t work either. I consulted the support message boards and tried a bunch of different settings, making error logs more verbose where I could. I did this many times and each time meant taking the hard drive out of the TiVo, putting it in the PC, running a few commands and reinstalling into the TiVo. The carpet between the study and the living room was starting to wear out.

Next, Part VI, Ethernot